I watched the inauguration on Fox News. I admit there was some perversity involved -- I wanted both to tremble with outrage and to gloat. I also wanted to remember why I liked Barack Obama, and there is no better way of liking Barack Obama than watching him on a network that pays people to hate him. His first term was questionable in many ways, but one thing was certain -- he wasn't them. He wasn't Brit and Megyn and Brett and Chris, with their grievances and their grudges and their hurt feelings, and he wasn't the man they were still half-heartedly defending, Mitt Romney.

Has anybody else besides Ann Romney mentioned Mitt Romney's name since November 6? Has anyone watched Fox? The network once thought to be integral to Karl Rove's "permanent Republican majority" now has to live down the election-night memory of Rove standing in the schoolhouse door between Megyn Kelly and the announcement that Barack Obama had won a second term. Roger Ailes created a news network designed to elect presidents, but he built it upon his own immortal and immortalized sense of injury, and now that he "lost" the election, the sense of injury is all that's left. If you've decided to give Fox a rest because life is too short, it's worth checking out again, if only because it provides a handy time warp: Fox News is so very 2009, so very terrorist-fist-bumpy. The difference is that back then, it was able to turn its election loss into win, by marshalling nascent anti-Obama sentiment and becoming the voice of unbridled opposition. Now it just seems dispirited. Roger Ailes does one thing very well: white-guy disgruntlement. It's a potent force, when there are enough disgruntled white guys. But now that the demographics are turning against him, all Ailes can offer is a fulfillment of his own paranoia -- the spectacle of cafeteria overlords like Megyn Kelly and Brit Hume turning into permanent underdogs.

Indeed, if the Fox News inauguration crew were a local six o'clock news team, you could cue up their nightmare three-attribute lead-in: "They're touchy! They're thin-skinned! And they don't have a clue." On Monday, Barack Obama gave a pretty good speech, applying all his fierce chops and formidable craft to a statement of the values that got him re-elected in the fall and neglecting to say anything that anyone who voted for him could possilby disagree with. But he showed his genius as a politican by making the speech so inclusive that it excluded only those who didn't subscribe to its vision, and who were left on the ground by the helium of his rhetoric. It was pretty obvious, what he was doing -- he's only been doing it since 2004. But the Foxies were baffled by it, and went from decrying its lack of policy specifics to bemoaning its advancement of "the liberal agenda." Megyn Kelly was reduced to reminding her audience that a president who decried "name-calling" had called poor Mitt Romney names during the campaign, and Charles Krauthammer to calling a speech that was nothing if not Reaganesque in its strategies "a rebuke to Ronald Reagan." They all took the perceived slights in the speech very personally, but none more than Brit Hume and Chris Wallace, who went into a duet of umbraged one-upsmanship -- the speech was "uncompromising" before it was "unyielding," until at last Hume decided matters by declaring it "utterly bereft of outreach to the opposition" and evidence that for President Obama "the lesson of the first term was, Let's jam it down their throats."

Who are these people? Ailes has made a living from his ability to find performers and news-readers who can come alive on camera, no matter how inexperienced, unschooled, or unconventional. But now that his network has become estranged from its political purpose, he's left with a freak show, nowhere more so than in his uncharacteristically desperate bid to ape the competition, The Five. Fox was the first of the networks to cut away from the inaugural proceedings, as if the only way it could respond to Obama's gibes was by snubbing him. The five folks on The Five took this tat-for-tat a step further, by making it clear that they didn't want to be there and that they didn't want to talk about it. But Ailes has always said that what he wants are happy warriors, and he couldn't have been pleased by what he saw -- Dana Perino, who looks like an animatronic movie assassin whose eyes have turned back on once too often, and Greg Gutfeld, who offers the world a glimpse of what the E-Trade baby might look like hideously grown up, trying to top each other with attitudes of stony scorn and louche indifference. All The Five gave poor old Uncle Roger to look at was the front-and-center floor show of raven-haired conservative temptress Kimberly Guilfoyle swinging her red stripper heels, but what's made Ailes successful is his identification with his audience, and no one has ever accused him of not knowing what other embittered old white men might like.

The question, of course, is whether he knows what anyone else in the United States might like, or whether his network, even as it holds its captive audience, will descend further into political irrelevance. For all his instinctive showmanship, and for all his purported populist genius, Ailes saw Obama cobble together his new majority right under his nose, and knew neither what to call it or how to stop it -- indeed, just like Mitt Romney, he abetted its development every time he assailed its existence. It was no different on Monday. Barack Obama did not sing what Krauthammer called a "hymn to big government"; he sang a hymn to American commonality. He recognized every American but those who watch Fox News, and all Fox News could do about it was complain that he wasn't enough like Reagan, when Reagan was really what Obama succeeded in jamming down the conservative throat. Citing the movement of history, he declared his values universal ones, and gave voice not only to a new American but also to a new moral majority. In response, the Foxies either complained that he had not vowed to cut spending -- single-issue adherence being Ailes' idea of a universal value -- or shook their heads in collective befuddlement and distaste, to the extent that the network's White House correspondent opined, on Martin Luther King's birthday, that Obama's speech was "relentless on civil rights" but that if you asked "any 100 Americans," civil rights would not be "their idea of an important issue."

It's too bad, really, because it's important to have a strong opposition voice in network news reporting when a politician is as adept as Barack Obama at both charming and strong-arming the press. But Fox seemed not merely tone-deaf, not merely disconnected and a bit disheveled in its response to Obama's inauguraton; it seemed almost decadent -- tired, distracted, cynical and lazy. It had done its level best to make sure that none of its favored candidates would ever deliver a speech like the one Barack Obama delivered for his second inaugural. It had done everything it could to convince the American public to elect a candidate who couldn't deliver the speech like the one Obama delivered if his Cayman Island stash depended on it. Now, on a day when the candidate stayed home and neglected even to listen on the radio to the speech he spent most of his life dreaming of making, mighty Fox News might as well have been crafted in his image. It has been so successful, so game-changing, so revolutionary, so feared, so hated, so parsed, picked at and obsessed over, no one, not even its most fervent detractors and certainly not Roger Ailes, could have imagined that like Mitt Romney, it would end up so small.